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" The final days of French haute cuisine have been predicted about as often as those of Broadway, not least in the plaintive title of Michael Steinberger&amp;#039;s 2009 book Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France, which details what he sees as a decline in both standards and admiration for the glories of French cuisine. You hear the objections: No one wants to sit in a stuffy, pretentious French dining room and eat expensive, heavy food full of foie gras and butter. People now want to go to fast, casual places with menus full of pizza, hamburgers, short ribs, mac-and-cheese, pork-belly sliders, and all the other staples of modern gastronomy. The fact is, though, while the latter assertion is certainly true, the first is not, by a long shot: There is as much French food on the trendiest of American menus as there is American, Italian, or Asian. Those who dismiss French restaurants remind me of Yogi Berra&amp;#039;s saying of a restaurant, &amp;quot;Nobody goes there anymore. It&amp;#039;s too crowded.&amp;quot; Try, for instance, to get a dinner table on short notice at any of New York&amp;#039;s resolutely haute French restaurants \u2014 all with 80 or more seats \u2014 like Le Bernardin, Le Cirque, Jean-Georges, Bouley, Adour, Corton, Eleven Madison Park, or Daniel. Check out the packed dining rooms at New York French bistros like Balthazar (arguably the most popular restaurant in the city since the day it opened in 1997), Benoit, DB Bistro Moderne, La Mangeoire, and Pastis. The best restaurants in Las Vegas are on a par with the best in Paris \u2014 indeed, they are run by the same people, including three-star Michelin master chefs Jo\u00EBl Robuchon, Guy Savoy, and Pierre Gagnaire. While it is certainly true that a few major U.S. cities, like Houston, Miami, Charleston, and Denver, lack any well-known high-end French restaurants, most have plenty of very popular old and new French bistros and brasseries, like Bistro Niko in Atlanta, Central in D.C., Hamersley&amp;#039;s Bistro in Boston, Chez Papa Bistrot in San Francisco, and Bistronomic in Chicago. At the buzzing Church &amp;amp;amp; State in L.A., the menu is entirely French, from soupe \u00E0 l&amp;#039;oignon gratin\u00E9e and tarte flamb\u00E9e to rillettes de saumon and roulade de lapin. And it would be tough to find any restaurants in New Orleans not in the debt of French classicism, from the ancient Antoine&amp;#039;s to the new Stella. But the inconvenient truth forgotten by those who dismiss French cuisine is that so many of their favorite restaurants and chefs are thoroughly drenched in French food culture, which is still the primary course of study at U.S. culinary schools like the Culinary Institute of America, Johnson &amp;amp;amp; Wales, and the French Culinary Institute, which have graduated so many of today&amp;#039;s best-known American chefs, from Alfred Portale of New York&amp;#039;s Gotham Bar and Grill to Emeril Lagasse. Forget for the moment that all non-Asian sauces are based on classic French models, from a simple roux to a B\u00E9arnaise, from a veal stock to a beurre blanc. Instead, just look at the menus of the most talked-about restaurants around today. Take, for instance, Minetta Tavern, once a mediocre Italian eatery in New York&amp;#039;s Greenwich Village, and now, under superstar restaurateur Keith McNally, a thoroughly French bistro that is literally impossible to get into even weeks in advance. Its menu? Huitres et cr\u00E9pinettes, daube de boeuf, mouclade, and brandade de morue. At the superb new restaurant Plume in D.C., alongside the Maryland crab risotto and hamachi tataki, the menu lists foie gras with beets and brioche; monkish \u00E0 la grenobloise; lobster Thermidor; and eggplant tian. At Dallas&amp;#039;s eclectic Nosh, you can get a Kobe burger or a croque monsieur, grilled ahi tuna or steak au poivre, and cookies or tarte Tatin for dessert. In fact, the underpinnings of the raging gastropub fad are largely French: At Chef Stephanie Izzard&amp;#039;s Girl and the Goat in Chicago, you can order fried loup de mer with potato a\u00EFoli, mousse of goat&amp;#039;s liver, and confit of goat&amp;#039;s belly, polishing that off with chocolate bouchon with a gooseberry compote. The name on the door may be thoroughly American, but the dishes on the menus of contemporary restaurants owe a great deal to French cooking. It&amp;#039;s hard to go anywhere without running into the stuff. So, while it might be accurate that people aren&amp;#039;t talking so much about eating French food, the truth is we&amp;#039;ve always really loved it. PLUS: More John Mariani on Esquire&amp;#039;s Eat Like a Man Blog and John Mariani&amp;#039;s Official Site "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/food/a13409/in-defense-of-french-food-032712/>